How can we change the lens on our reality?

This was a post from our caregiver group, “Changing the Emotions of Caregiving” that I recently posted that gives more insight into how I see the caregiver dilemma….Enjoy

To begin I thought I would explain why I decided to call this group "Changing the Emotions of Caregiving"? Well to answer that I need to tell you a little bit about myself and since there are so many new faces, it might be a good time for a short introduction.

My name is Tanya Yarkoni and I live in Israel but I am originally from the UK where I was educated and went to university. I am skimming over a lot of information that is all relevant, but way too long for an FB post but in 1999 I moved with my husband to New York, pre-kids, and within a year I was working with an old friend of mine in the music business helping to promote incredible bands, DJs, artists and was generally having a lot of fun, frequently in a state of oblivion, in the city that never sleeps. Life was on paper "Fun". The city was giving me everything I needed and I didn't need to rely too much on my own perception of reality because the City was doing an amazing job at keeping me stimulated and entertained which is how we like it, isn't it?

In 2004, we gave birth to our first daughter, Nina, who came out neurotypical and is today nearly 17 years old. Then came Leia, my second daughter who today is 14 years old, and I thought it was going to be a replay of the previous experience so I was wired with a set of expectations of how things were going to go. Very quickly we realized this wasn't the case although it took us years to actually get a diagnosis.

Today we know Leia has a very rare genetic mutation which is only in fact a set of numbers and digits - ZNF462 - and yes there is a name of the scientists who identified these specific anomalies. Leia is non-verbal, has multiple development delays, she cannot chew, she is mobile, she doesn't do anything of real purpose with her hands and she has many characteristics that are Autistic.

I say all this without actually feeling very much (beyond a very deep feeling of love) and that is because today, I see everything differently, and that is what I want to talk about.

Like most caregivers after a few years, I wasn't coping well. Like most caregivers I had thrown myself into solving "the problem' and didn't see my own wellbeing or even the need to look at my reality differently as something I should consider or be concerned about. Instead, I went into a state of hypervigilance where I was on alert, responding, snoozing at times with one eye open, waiting for the next thing to happen. This sounds familiar, doesn't it? We've all been there and for many of us, even when the situation plateaus or calms down for a while, we know caring for someone "vulnerable" will probably bring more chaos at some point.

This shift or transition was hard to accept. I was a good times girl in NYC, who had absolutely zero reference point to understand what was happening to me, and over time found myself spiraling down. Literally, anything could do it. A challenging meal trying to feed her, a chat with a doctor, another test in a hospital, a stare from the woman in the supermarket, a walk in the park watching mothers with neurotypical kids, a difficult physiotherapy session, a disappointing reaction from family... pretty soon I found myself entirely responding 24/7 to my environment with my stress and fatigue and as my attention narrowed and became more focused on helping her, my emotions became a reflection of what I was experiencing.

As I mentioned before, my husband and I like to party which has actually been a godsend on many occasions, but each time, I would come home, often with a hangover, and find the next day even harder. I realized I could not escape. I realized this was my reality and that I could not run away. It never occurred to me that I could look at my reality differently or that I was in some way responsible for how I was feeling.

As many of you know, the great "aha" moment for me happened in August 2010, just as I was turning 40. You know how 40 is that mid-life age where people start to worry about aging. All I could think about was that I had already had a tough 40 years (more will be revealed someday) and if the next 40 was going to be anything like the first 40, then I better get equipped.

It was a friend of mine who was actually helping me with Leia who kept telling me to go and do a 10-day silent meditation retreat called Vipassana. It sounded like a drastic and difficult thing to do, ten days in the desert without a phone, notepad, no exercise, total silence, no eye contact, many hours of meditation from 4am .. but things were feeling extreme and my friend was insistent especially since she kept finding me under the covers crying. In the end, I signed up, and with some words of encouragement and advice on what to expect I went off for what was a life-changing experience.

I still believe, to this day, that the truly life-changing experiences, are the ones you actually physically experience when all of your senses are being stretched in ways they never knew before (yes caregiving is one of them). That may sound obvious, but what do experiences create... knowledge and on Vipassana I saw for the first time in my life that I did not have to look at my life in the same way. That actually I was looking at my experience from quite a limited perspective and that the primary source of my misery was myself.

Now this may sound obvious but it wasn't to me. I thought it was completely justified and understandable that I would see myself as a struggling victim and that since I had already experienced other tough periods in my life, then why should I expect this to be any different. Life is tough after all and I believed my environment from time to time just served me up another tough experience for no clear reason other than to toughen me up.

Now this is what I want to share with you and it may sound controversial. You cannot view something differently if you don't have the knowledge and yes my friends, that goes for caregiving too.

Imagine a world where when you found out you were to become a caregiver, a whole knowledge system was presented that immersed you for a period of time so that you could develop a new mindset to experience caregiving in a different way....

When we learn new knowledge and information, when we experience new things, when we build awareness about ourselves, when we see our habits and beliefs and do something new because the old way isn't serving us anymore, we create new circuits to perceive what was already there but we never saw or paid attention to it.

Let's take a wine connoisseur...if you were to pull out some fantastic vintage 1992 Saint Emilion premier cru bottle of wine and give it to someone who understands wines and has practice tasting and building awareness about wine for a long time, they would be able to appreciate everything about it. The aroma, the way the tannins interact, the color, the alcohol content, the age, the region in which it was grown, the grapes used, in short, the connoisseur after years of training has wired their brain so well to perceive the subtleties of the wine that they can enjoy every ounce of it.

Now let's give the same bottle to someone who knows nothing about wine, they would not be able to appreciate it, in fact, it would probably taste the same to them as a screw-off top for $5. They wouldn't be able to experience any difference because their brain isn't wired to appreciate it. This isn't some elitist reference to wine connoisseurs, this is to make a point.

I am here to tell you that the reason our experience as caregivers is as hard as it is, is that we haven't wired our brains to perceive it differently. This isn't our fault. We do not have the knowledge or the experience. We are led to believe our environment dictates what we experience (and so far most of us have had extremely poor examples of what this experience should be like), but actually what needs to happen is the complete reverse.

We need to learn to pay attention to things that we normally never pay attention to (but actually exist all the time) and once we start to do this, once we start to change the lens of our reality to start to process other bits of information (the brain processes 400 billion bits of information every second - is it possible we are missing some bits of reality) which we then practice daily, well then, before you know it, you will start to experience a new reality.

So now going back to my first question in this post... why did I call this group "Changing the Emotions of Caregiving". Today we know at least 50% of who you are has nothing to do with genetics, or a pre-determined process or the hardwiring of our brain. The other 50% is up to us to begin to make our own circuits and connections and there are only two ways that we make these circuits and connections. The first way we create connections is from knowledge we learn from somebody else's experience.

The second way of learning is through our own personal experience. Every time we experience something new, all of our five senses are immersed in the process. This rush of data releases neurotransmitters that produce a feeling or an emotion. So if we keep experiencing the same emotions daily (as I was until I went to Vipassana), then it's safe to say we haven't changed our experience. We are in fact, living with memorized emotions from the past which is why we keep getting more of the same and in order for us to experience new emotions, the only way for us to achieve this is through gaining new knowledge and through creating new experiences for ourselves.

This is what happened to me initially with Vipassana and mindfulness, then with the very challenging and incredible homeschooling program I did and then later through my learning about neuroscience, consciousness and energy and now through my training as a mindfulness teacher. Today I know, the emotional propensities and addictions I live by are in fact a product of how I observe the world and that if I am still suffering it is because I am still practicing an old version of myself.

This is the work... it takes time because you have to feel it and experience it. You have to practice it and let it sink in. The harder it feels, the harder it is for us to imagine another way. But there is always another way.